A Step Beyond
by FireHazardous
Summary: A challenge in the style of NaNoWriMo. (I couldn't wait until November to start.) For Naruto, Hinata, Sakura and Sasuke, life is not as cut and dried as others think it is. Nor is it, strictly speaking, as linear. Walking the void between worlds was dangerous, they knew, but they always thought they'd be able to stop.
1. Chapter 0

Hyuuga Hinata has always been a quiet, gentle girl, not at all the heiress her father desired. Her ruthlessness is famously nonexistent, and her flaws, in the eyes of her clan, are many. So when, on a quiet summer's eve, she approaches her appointed guardian for the night, he does not expect her to suddenly strike out at him, disabling him at the exact moment he notices her hands have already moved, two perfect strikes to stomach and neck. Not that he would have successfully evaded her strike if he had been prepared. By the time his eyes close and he slumps down to the gutter, she has already vanished, moving with the grace of a doe through the tangled streets of the first Great Ninja Village, Konoha.

Haruno Sakura, like Hinata, is not the daughter her parents wanted. The child of merchants, Sakura is brash and loud, and, despite a strong head for academics, is not nearly as smart as her test scores claim. Confined to her room after arriving home with bandages on her arm and knuckles from a brawl with another room, her mother expects little of her for the night but shrill complaints issuing from behind a locked door. And that is exactly what she gets, even as her daughter sneaks quietly out her second-story window, and climbs quickly to the street.

Uzumaki Naruto has different challenges than Sakura or Hinata. His protectors are many, and clever. They begin with the three Chuunin hidden upon his roof, watching him without even his own knowledge, or so they believe. Across the street from his home are two masked agents, neither of whom knows the other. These two have a very simple job. One watches the other, and both watch the three on the roof, for treachery. If any of the five men makes a move towards either agent, or their blonde charge, that man would quickly find himself less a lung. Three layers of redundant, paranoid, and non-intrusive security later is the old man who is master of them all, indeed master of all those spoken of thus far, though he would never think of himself or allow others to think of him in such a way. He watches too, in his spare moments, adding his own eyes to an operation which has continued without any failures for eleven years. While cooking dinner, Naruto flinches at a scurrying rat, hits his head on the wall behind him, and collapses to the ground. A trained assassin, hands drenched in the blood of dozens and possessing powers he has taken a lifetime to hone, sighs gently before leaving his assigned post, and approaches the boy, grumbles briefly about the nearly painful spectacle of watching Uzumaki knock himself out for the third time in a week, and takes the boy to the hospital. And an overlooked rat makes his escape.

Uchiha Sasuke puts on his shoes, and walks out the front door.


	2. Chapter 1

Naruto skipped merrily across rooftops, cloaked in a trio of genjutsu to evade notice. Noticing a familiar silhouette against faraway rooftops, Naruto began angling himself more directly toward his goal. The other shadow, out of the corner of Naruto's eye, began to pick up speed, so Naruto did the same, and soon a full race had begun, two young boys dashing at velocities no civilian could ever dream of.

Though Naruto had been the closest when their impromptu race began, he had never been the fastest, and Sasuke reached their objective almost a full second ahead of him. Before the two boys stood an old warehouse, nominally owned by the Haruno family for the storage of their goods, though they had long ago abandoned the dilapidated facility.

Noises sounded from behind the two, and within a tenth of a second both were gone; the bush the noise had originated from found itself, suddenly and to its great surprise, lacking most of its root structure, as Sasuke's ninja-to sliced it cleanly from the ground. Its threat discounted by a summary decapitation, Sasuke prepared to move back onto the roofs to survey the area, then quickly decided against it.

Hinata grinned back at him across the kunai that had found its way against his neck. With a finger to her lips and a quick gesture of her chin, Hinata pushed Sasuke backwards through unlocked doors. Naruto, abandoning subtlety like subtlety was a cheating spouse, followed them in.

As soon as the heavy wooden doors had swung closed behind them, Naruto reached behind his back for the backpack he'd been carrying and dumped its contents on a nearby table. Sasuke reached forward and, claiming an inkwell and a brush, began to paint a seal array across the floor. Hinata, crouched upside down on the roof, watched with interest and occasionally corrected errors in Sasuke's work. Naruto cheerfully got out a pot and a package of instant ramen, and started cooking with a quick fire jutsu.

A rapid succession of seventeen knocks of various frequencies emenated from the door, and Hinata flipped down from the roof to open it. Yanking the door open and pulling Sakura in took about a quarter of a second for her, since she already knew where her friend would be, not to mention the exact positioning of her body.

"Sasuke, are you almost done?" Naruto called out, as much to make the others start talking as to get a timeframe.

"I am done, idiot. Did you miss the part where I stopped working?"

"Well then what are we waiting for, bastard? Everybody's here, aren't they? Start your stupid seal!"

"No tact, Naruto. None at all." Sasuke sighed and grimaced. "Hinata, if you don't mind?"

"Of course not. We've done this before, haven't we?" Hinata strode over to Sasuke, took her position within the array of complicated seals, and folded her legs beneath her as she sat down. "Any time you're ready."

Sasuke nodded, and carefully strung together four hand seals, before slamming both palms onto the ground in front of Hinata. Sharingan blazed, Byakugan bulged, and both went utterly still.

Sasuke blinked, and looked around. Combining two dojutsu was just asking for trouble, under any circumstance that could even pretend toward normality, of course. But nothing in this warehouse was normal, and most definitely not their circumstances. The ability to see through, and more importantly, into, walls was one that the Byakugan was well known for. Mixed with the Sharingan's ability to discern chakra patterns, Sasuke could manipulate the net of security seals he'd painted to perfect alignment, and sweep through it for even the tiniest of holes. Within a minute he was satisfied, and released his technique, bracing himself for what would happen next.

Hinata gasped, then gasped again. Twin trails of crimson blood leaked from the tear ducts of eyes, once the purest, brightest ivory, now mixed with a filthy brown that told everybody what was wrong. The bloodline of her clan, her precious Byakugan, her EYES, were now nothing but burnt out old bulbs, sacrificed forever to give scant few moments of clarity to another. Sasuke hated himself, and reached out for her.

"We're dark," he managed to choke out to the other two, who looked on helplessly. "We have twenty minutes before the seals drift out of alignment again. Until then, an activated Byakugan won't even notice there's a building here, much less be able to see inside."

"Good." Said Sakura, jaw set firmly against her friend's quiet trembles. "Do it, then. Don't delay for your guilt, moron. Get us somewhere where we can make it right."

Sasuke glared at the young girl, only twelve years old and watching another girl cry blood without a hint of sympathy. Self control was one thing, he always felt, and keeping cool in an emergency was as important a skill as any jutsu he knew. But that was one thing, and the members of their group were another. Still, she wasn't actually wrong, so...

"Kamui."

* * *

And the wo/rld broke.

* * *

Kamui is not a good place to be, according to the very few people who have survived the trip. It juts right up against the edge of the Dark Reaches, for one, and in fact, some areas are thin indeed. It's damn hard to get to, as well, anybody can tell you that. Kamui is so famously hard to get to, that the most popular book on the subject of the strange sub-dimension was titled Sharingans Only, Bitch, to make sure everybody got the message. Sasuke hates going there, as necessary as it is, and he hates that he must force others to do the same. Nevertheless, here he comes, guiding their party through places that don't technically exist, to a place that physics insists can't be real, guided only by his magic eyes that let him shoot fire and teleport. Sasuke hates most of the things about that sentence. He wishes his life made sense.

Tearing a hole in space time hurts like a bitch, especially when you're doing it without a seal array, alone, in a dark warehouse in the middle of the night. Namikaze was crazy for making this his signature move, as far as Sasuke is concerned. Fancy kunai as anchors or not, exposing yourself so often to the Dark Reaches can only lead to trouble. Sometimes literally, like the cancer it can give you. Sometimes less obviously, like the seven years of bad luck, or other perks. Madara spent twelve years with an extra nipple while he was training with Kamui, Sasuke's father told him once. Wonder how many nipples the Yondaime had, by the time he died.

Sasuke cheers slightly as he notices the slow return of gravity. As usual, efforts to distract himself from the terrors that make the Dark Reaches their home (and the other, much worse things for which it is a prison) have been totally successful. Another second or so...

And the world\fixed itself.

Sasuke collapsed, panting, against one of the stone pillars that are the alpha and omega of Kamui's awful landscaping. Hinata frowned slightly, pulling in on herself against the darkness. Sakura smiled a small smile, and went to help her. And Naruto, cheering at the top of his voice, launched himself a good thirty feet in the air as he leapt forward, toward the only interesting thing this world had.


	3. Chapter 2

The universe is infinite. It is also a sphere. Don't think about it too hard. The multiverse is an infinite collection of infinite universes, a giant space filled with tiny, infinitely large marbles. And the space between these marbles is called the Dark Reaches. When the gods made the universes, mostly to be dicks to the people in them, they used the Dark Reaches to separate them, and tossed a billion horrible demons, a host of insane demigods, and seven or eight giant octopi with thousands of writhing, grasping tentacles inside.

If you and your friends, let's just say there's four of you in total, were to accidentally find yourselves trapped, pulled along on an endless tour of the multiverse, forced to live out your lives again and again, it would probably get pretty monotonous. After all, no matter what you do, you're never going to be able to bring something with you from one universe to another, so all you can do is reset to the same initial conditions and try and change things from there. Snoozeville, right? Boring as a modest nun.

But what if you had a gift the gods hadn't planned for? What if there was a little island in the Dark Reaches that they hadn't noticed? Why, if you could find a way to reach it, reach it accurately and consistently, you could store your stuff there, couldn't you? And then the conditions could be different.

Praise the bad planning of the Gods, then, for the Mangekyo Sharingan, and for Kamui, and for you.

Because you've been doing this for a while now. And you've managed to collect a whole lot of stuff.

Naruto dashed through a small town's worth of junk: a pile of rusty swords over here, a haystack made of needles over there, and emergency stockpiles of instant ramen everywhere. Nobody bothered organizing their hoard, since it would just fall to pieces again eventually. But Naruto knew what he was looking for, and his instincts have always been solid. It takes him less than a minute to lay hands on the specific jar he wants, and by the two minute mark he's handed it off to Sakura, and moved over next to Hinata.

As Sakura reached into the jar to remove its contents, Naruto's dexterous fingers reached out and quickly plucked Hinata's dead eyes from their sockets. Sakura, moving with equal haste, smoothly followed his hands with her own, and popped new eyes right back in. A quick medical jutsu later, and the spare Byakugan that Hinata had stashed away came alive, and she was back to normal. Chakra surgery is a delicate and careful art.

Together, the four strode over to their treasure trove, planning their next move.

"Do either of you want a dojutsu?" Sasuke called, gesturing toward a large jar filled with Sharingan eyes floating in preservative. "We've got a few spares from the last time we killed Danzo."

"No Sharingan for me," Naruto shouted back from the other side of a pile of juggling clubs and musical instruments. "Though I think we might have a Rinnegan set lying around! That'd really freak out Pain!"

"Not anymore, sorry." Hinata said, sweeping Kamui with her Byakugan, "Sasuke gave them to Temari to get her to date him."

"Very impressive, playboy." Sakura laughed. "Who cares! New dawn, new day, new life! I want to drink! Narutooooo! Liquor!"

"We don't have anything, Sakura! We used the last of it celebrating Neji's jonin promotion, remember? We're completely dry."

"No, dammit! We are going to drink, and we are going to drink HARD. Naruto, you're supposed to be a badass summoning master. Get me some booze!"

"Yeah, Sakura. I'll just try to summon sake out of the Dark Reaches. Then, when something unspeakably awful comes through instead, I'll die valiantly trying to fight it."

"His death will unleash the Kyuubi," Hinata adds, "which will kill whatever Naruto pulls through, luckily, and then turn around and murder the three of us."

"All in all," Sasuke finishes, "We all die. Kyuubi tears through all the crap we have lying around, and any semblance of organization is destroyed. Then it will wander aimlessly through an endless, empty plain it can't escape from until we come back with the next dawn, at which point we will have to fight it ourselves, and either beat it or abandon Kamui forever. And you will never drink again."

Sakura frowned. "You could make a specific request, then?.Something out here has to be friendly. And stocked."

Naruto laughed aloud at that. "Yeah, Sakura-chan. I'll just send a call to Jashin, ask him for some of his personal stock. He's probably a chill guy, he'll come through for us."

Sasuke interrupted. "I don't care. We'll drink back in Konoha. Get whatever you need, we have to leave in three minutes. Did you forget we have a schedule?"

"I'm ready now," Naruto said, bouncing over to Sasuke.

"Good. Ladies?"

"Indeed."

"Yeah."

"Then get ready. Kamui!"

* * *

Sakura slipped back into her room just as quietly as she had left it. The genjutsu she'd used to trick her parents had deactivated while she was out, so she slipped her new gear into the closet quietly. New gloves, new kunai, her two wakizashi, and a crossbow were stashed under a spare towel for the night, and she crawled into bed.

Hinata returned home and reported her absentee protector. Two ninja were dispatched by her scowling father, and the clearly drunken man was brought back to the compound. Although the Branch House Hyuuga insisted that Hinata had disabled him, the clan head overrode him, and assigned him to guard the compound's inner wall for three months as punishment. Hinata stole into the kitchens after her father dismissed her, picked up a small snack, and went to sleep.

Long years under surveillance had taught Naruto a few things about ANBU. For example, while they will, under most circumstances, notice a Naruto who is attempting to evade their eyes, on the occasions when he successfully gives them the slip, they are much worse at noticing when he returns. Naruto stashes the gear he's claimed in a trio of scrolls, then those into a small square of paper with a microscopic seal on it. With this placed simply in his pocket, Naruto strolls over to the hospital. A simple Replacement with his shadow clone through the hospital window later, and Naruto is back under the watchful eyes of the Hokage.

Sasuke doesn't make it home.


	4. Chapter 3

Sasuke woke up bound, blindfolded, and gagged, and was free before his captors realized he was conscious. Sharingan picking out shapes against a sliver moon, he identified his threats as Orochimaru's Sound 4, and relaxed. Easily ambushed, maybe. Never really concerned with watching his back, sure. That was what Hinata and Naruto were for, after all. But Sasuke would never allow himself to be any less than the strongest, the fastest, and the deadliest, even newly reborn as a child. If physical strength wouldn't let him overcome his enemies, he'd just have to rely on skill.

Three shuriken flashed toward the fat man, who raised his hands and took them in the forearms. At the same time, the creepy spider guy shot forward, then ducked and moved back away from a jabbed kunai. Sasuke flipped backwards to create space, hands flashing through a jutsu that was complete by the time he hit the ground. Raising hands to his mouth, the Uchiha blew a stream of fire at the four, who scattered to avoid him.

Three on the left: two on the ground, and the girl in the tree. Creepy spider guy to his right, making kunai out of his golden slime stuff. The girl snapped her flute to her lips. Sasuke cocked his head at that. What was her thing? Was the music supposed to be a genjutsu? Sasuke shrugged. Honestly, he had never bothered remembering their gimmicks. Orochimaru's so-called elites were nothing but a crew of jokes, after all. Kimimaro might be a threat, but obviously the snake hadn't bothered to send his strongest minion to capture a single Academy student.

Sasuke threw a kunai at flute girl out of principle, stopping the music she had begun to play before throwing himself at spider-man. The stupid bastard tried to hit him with a net made of his weird secretions, but it was nothing to dodge the wide attack. Then Sasuke was on him, jamming a kunai up into his skull from under his jaw, swinging around to attempt to use the corpse as cover against the other three. Except then the kunai shattered on the man's transparent armor, and Sasuke found himself in a simultaneous choke hold and wrist lock from his opponent's six arms. Sasuke struggled, but couldn't break free, four arms short of an equal grapple with the arachnoid shinobi. Giving up on an even battle with what he'd perceived as a lesser challenge, Sasuke manifested his Mangekyo, and blew the spider's head off with a short blast of Amaterasu. Shrugging out of the corpse's hold, Sasuke ducked to the right to evade two-heads' punch, only to take one anyway from an arm that sprouted suddenly from the elbow. Flying backwards from the force, Sasuke only barely had time to glare daggers at two-heads before he smashed into a tree. Wincing at the pain shooting through his untrained body, Sasuke pushed himself back to his feet, pulling out shuriken connected by wires. Something stilled his hand, though. A thought, half-buried memory, was wriggling to the front of his mind. The Uchiha blinked, and pulled hard on the forming recollection.

Kidomaru! That was his name. Always good to know the names of the people you kill, that's Sasuke's belief. It's one of his best counters when people call him a psychopath – he makes sure he finds out their names eventually, even if it takes him a few dawns. Remembering their names doesn't matter so much; after all, they always come back. But he always knows. Very few in his profession could claim the same, especially those near his level of skill.

"You're a tough little shit, aren't you? Didn't expect you to have those fancy eyes, either. But you're still only one fucking brat, and there's three of us. You're going to pay for Kidomaru, shithead," Flute Girl growled at him. "Come on, you assholes. We'll go straight to Stage 2 and teach him a few things about ninja."

Sasuke had to laugh at that. "Girl, you're not half as good as you think you are, even with your master's seals. Go all out, if you want. Only I will live to see endless dawns."

Tayuya spat at him. Tayuya! Sasuke smiled at his good memory. Only two-heads and fatty to go. Always good to know the names of the people you kill.

Speaking of Fatty, he was obviously not much of a talker. Sasuke spun to the left, dropped, and slashed a kunai through the leg of the orange-haired man as he crashed past. A sigh escaped his lips. In what world could that guy be an effective ninja? He was almost a meter across! Far too big to be quick, far too out of shape to be strong. Sasuke revised his opinion slightly a moment later, when a boulder the size of his room flew towards his head. At least Fatty's earth ninjutsu were up to par.

"Bored now." Sasuke declared. His wire-threaded shuriken flew from his hands, tearing through the air toward Tayuya and Two-Heads. Just as the two readied to dodge, a yank on the wires swung his throwing stars onto a whole new trajectory, and Two-Heads went down, Four shuriken buried in two throats.

Tayuya growled at the black-haired child who was destroying her team. She quickly backpedaled, leaping away through the trees in an attempt to gain enough distance to transform to her Stage 2 Cursed form. A grim smile, a body flicker, and a kunai from Sasuke ended that plan, and then it was just him and Fatty, who roared at him.

Sasuke just laughed back. "What's your name, Skinny? Just been bugging me this whole time."

The fat man's answer was practically a scream. "I am Jirobo, of the Sound Four! Champion and Guardian of Otogakure! I am the one who will take your head!"

"You won't. You can't. But I welcome you to try."

Jirobo opened combat with earth techniques. Slamming his hands against the ground, he coated his arms up to the elbow in stone, then lifted a good head-sized chunk of rock in each palm. Hurling them at his enemy, Jirobo rushed forward, his injured ankle slowing him down only a little. Punching towards Sasuke with wild haymakers, Jirobo wasn't surprised when the little boy managed to weave and dodge between his punches. He was a little more surprised that the boy hadn't tried to counter-attack; Jirobo had been counting on that to be the child's next move. Disengaging briefly, Jirobo brought his hands together as though to make a seal, then stomped the ground instead, causing a small quake to briefly destabilize Sasuke's footing. Jirobo closed the gap quickly, but Sasuke's loss of balance had been a feint, and Jirobo only barely dodged the kunai that whipped towards his stomach. Now Jirobo was the one off-balance, and Sasuke was far quicker to capitalize. A seal-less body flicker brought him right up next to the goliath, and a single seal later conjured his Chidori. Sasuke plunged his hand into Jirobo, and Jirobo of the South Gate coughed his life's blood onto the Last Uchiha's arm.

Sasuke finally relaxed, and pulled his arm out of his last enemy. Turning, Sasuke dug a small pit out of the ground with a jutsu. Jirobo, Tayuya, Kidomaru and Two-Heads went in the pit, and Sasuke covered them with dirt. He dashed quickly to the top of a nearby tree to see if he could find any nearby landmarks in the massive forest of the Land of Fire, and began the trek back to Konoha.

* * *

Naruto was having a great night. Turns out that knocking yourself unconscious when you're a jinchuriki, and therefore a national resource, apparently warranted an overnight stay at Konoha's hospital. Naruto disagreed. Thankfully, the aversion to hospitals is a common trait of every good trained soldier, and none of his ANBU guards decided to intervene while he made his escape.

Naruto ran, jumped, and occasionally cartwheeled down the streets of Konoha, as much to entertain his guards as himself. Hospitals either made him want to go to sleep the second he got out of them, or forced him to run around for hours on end to get the absolute boredom out of his system. Konoha Main was the latter, so Naruto decided to jumpstart his physical training by running his ANBU ragged. Pranking people in ways that they don't even notice is the second best way, behind doing so in ways that they DO notice. Naruto was a huge believer in reform among the ANBU ranks; a dozen elite ninja should be enough to alter entire battles, by his reckoning. The ones assigned to him could hardly keep up after only five hours. Naruto shook his head. Shameful. Ah well; this group, at least, he could keep in shape. War was coming, after all; nothing could stop it. Maybe he could make enough of a difference that they would get through the fires to come alive.

And then, all of a sudden, it was morning.

Mornings meant that he got to go to the Academy.

Naruto loved mornings.


End file.
